Hardy 11 - Suspect, The

by John Lescroart

  "I noticed, though, that you gave the statement about her death. Is that the company policy?"

  "Well, fortunately, until lately we haven't had to have a policy on that. In this case, we needed a statement for the paper, so I ginned one up. I'm afraid I don't really see anything particularly sinister about that." With one hand, he moved one of the piles of paper to a new location about a quarter inch from where it had been. "I told all this to Mr. Elliott this morning. You're trying to muddy the waters surrounding your client. Laudable in an attorney, I suppose, but actually fairly tedious for the rest of us."

  So, Gina thought, the gloves were coming off early. She gave him a saccharine smile. "Be that as it may, the reason Mr. Elliott was interested in the story had little or nothing to do with my client, but with the cover-up around the Dryden Socket that both Caryn and Kelley were trying to expose."

  He shook his head, his lips tight. "There is no cover-up, Ms. Roake. I don't know how these rumors get started, but there is no problem with the Dryden Socket. It's a remarkable device that marks a major improvement in the technology of hip replacement. The FDA will be issuing its formal approval any day now, and we're gearing up for tremendous worldwide demand. If we thought the product was harmful, do you imagine, one, that the FDA would give its approval and two, that we'd be so foolish as to go ahead with increased production, with all the lawsuits that a faulty product would entail?"

  "One," Gina didn't miss a beat, "the FDA would give its approval if they never got wind of problems because they occurred after the formal closure of the clinical trials. And two, you would if you needed immediate cash, had huge overseas orders that you could fill first, and were already working on an improved product that you could have in the pipeline before too much damage was done." She leaned back in her chair, looked over at Wyatt, back at Blair. "This issue isn't going to go away. Some folks have suggested the possibility that Caryn Dryden was killed to shut her up."

  "Don't be absurd."

  "Do you remember what you might have been doing on the night Caryn was killed?"

  "I don't even know what night Caryn was killed."

  "It was Sunday," Wyatt Hunt offered helpfully. "Three weeks ago."

  Blair scrunched his tiny eyes, the muscles in his cheeks working steadily. "This is beyond the pale," he said. "I have no idea what I was doing three weeks ago on a Sunday night. I'm quite certain, though, that whatever it was, it wasn't drowning one of my longtime stars." Suddenly he pushed back his chair and got himself onto his feet. "I'm afraid this meeting is going to have to come to an end," he said.

  "The issue isn't going to go away," Gina said as she stood up.

  But Blair didn't move. Safe behind his desk, he stood almost at a military attention. "I have nothing further to say to you," he said. "And you are not to return to these premises, or I'll have you removed. Go be ridiculous in the courtroom where people have to put up with you. And while you're at it, you might brush up on the libel laws before you start spreading any more vicious lies."

  33

  Wyatt dropped Gina at her Sutter Street office. The now-constant rain hadn't speeded up the commute any, and they didn't get back until about four forty-five. It had already been a long and exhausting day. Was it only this morning that she'd learned of Kelley Rusnak's death? And gone jogging with Hunt? It seemed impossible.

  As she was coming up the stairway to the firm's main offices on the second floor (they'd expanded the first-floor offices to accommodate an influx of new associates and a new word processing department), a wave of exhaustion suddenly washed over her. She actually stopped a few steps short of the top and put her briefcase down, wrestling with the idea of simply turning around, catching a cab for home, and maybe even squeezing in a short uninterrupted nap before the inevitable written or dictated recap of her day at the hearing. And then of course she'd also want to go over all of her discovery again to be sure that nothing escaped her in the continuing crush of events.

  Plus, she'd be needing to review Bethany Robley's statement so she'd be ready for her cross-examination tomorrow. Or, at least, she hoped it would be tomorrow. Clair Robley's courtroom attack on Stuart today might have repercussions beyond those anyone expected, and she had to be ready for them, too.

  And then she needed to check on Stuart, to see how seriously he'd been hurt. And make sure she got Wyatt's latest news after he and his crew interviewed the people about McAfee's alibi. And then she had to remember to call Fred Furth, whom she'd subpoenaed along with Kelley to corroborate Stuart's explanation of why he'd "disappeared" down the Peninsula.

  And maybe segue somehow from Furth's testimony into some of the PII issues. And then . . .

  Stopping herself, she realized she was already beginning to spin out of control. She had to keep her focus. The minute her mind started to relax—even standing in her stairwell—a half dozen other ideas, chores and responsibilities assaulted her consciousness. Maybe she'd manage a few hours of sleep before dawn, but that was all she could realistically expect, or allow herself.

  She picked up her briefcase and finished her climb.

  Only to be greeted by Phyllis as soon as the receptionist saw her. "Ah, Ms. Roake." In the rarefied and humorless world of the firm's ancient spinster of a receptionist, attorneys did not possess first names. "Mr. Farrell wanted to see you the minute you got in. On the Gorman matter. Shall I tell him you're on your way up?"

  Gina looked across the lobby to the stairs leading up. In her present state of fatigue, the dozen or so steps suddenly seemed as insurmountable as the final ascent to the peak of Whitney, or Shasta, or Kilimanjaro, all of which she'd summited in the past three years. But there was nothing for it—Wes wanted to see her right away about her case. But she still couldn't quite get herself to move, to start the climb. In her short hesitation, staring wearily over at the steps, Phyllis read her mind and, in response, cleared her throat. "If you won't be needing it up there, you could leave your briefcase behind the counter here with me. I'll keep an eye on it."

  Gina's briefcase, of a kind specially built for lawyers in trial or other litigation, was more than a foot thick and, loaded as it was with reference materials and other law books, her file folders, copies of all the discovery, Wyatt Hunt's interrogation tapes and other junk he'd collected in his investigations, and so on, it weighed more than twenty-five pounds. If she was going to be forced to make the ascent to Farrell's lair, at least she could do it without carrying the added weight.

  Smiling weakly, she put the briefcase down and pushed it behind the counter. "Thank you, Phyllis. That's a good call."

  A crisp nod. "I'll tell him you're on your way."

  It wasn't, after all, such a long or difficult journey. Ten steps across the lobby, fourteen stairs, another few steps to Farrell's well-decorated door. In keeping with his T-shirt motif, Farrell had much of his office door covered with liberal bumper and otherwise tasteless stickers, sometimes both at once: SOMEBODY GIVE BUSH A BLOW JOB SO WE CAN IMPEACH HIM; LAWYERS, GUNS & MONEY, THE OIL HAS HIT THE FAN; MY LAST GOOD CASE WAS ANCHOR STEAM BEER. But Gina had already read them all and today they didn't even register. She knocked once, cracked the door. "You decent?"

  "Probably not. Come on in. Watch out Gert doesn't escape." Wes was over by his refreshment counter, watching espresso drain into a tiny cup, and turned as she entered. His T-shirt today read A FRIEND WILL HELP YOU MOVE. A REALLY GOOD FRIEND WILL HELP YOU MOVE A BODY.

  "Phyllis said you looked like you could use some coffee," he said.

  "How much you got?" Gina asked. "She's a dear, that woman."

  "Actually," Wes replied, "company secret, but she's a robot. And the next generation, supposedly, they're making them with personalities. I can't wait." He handed her the demitasse. "So guess what? Kelley Rusnak was probably murdered."

  The cup stopped halfway to Gina's mouth. That had been her assumption all along, but it was nice to get the formal verification, and the vindication.

  Farrell leaned back aga
inst the counter. "My guy down in Redwood City called me about an hour ago. Kind of an interesting sequence of events, actually. His theory, anyway. You want to hear it all?"

  "As opposed to what? Half of it?"

  "Don't get snippy," he said.

  "Don't ask dumb questions and I won't. All of it. Yes, please."

  "Okay. The first thing a little weird was she had three mostly undissolved pills—Tylenol with codeine—in her mouth."

  "Undissolved. How could that happen?"

  "Well, one way, somebody could put them in her mouth after she was already dead, or close to it."

  "Again, though, why?"

  "Maybe because that was the only drug she had on hand with the prescription made out to her. The empty bottle was next to her bed where they found her, which is why they initially thought it was straight OD. But it wasn't. Why? No codeine in her blood."

  "None?"

  "Zero. She died from an overdose of Elavil, also called amytriptilene. Which is a prescription antidepressant."

  Gina put her untouched coffee down on the table, lowered herself onto the couch, absently stroking the dog who'd come over. "But let me guess. There was no bottle for this stuff in her place, with her name on it?"

  "Right. But wait, listen, it gets better. The other thing she had on board was Rohypnol."

  Gina knew what that was. "The date-rape drug."

  "Exactly. And she could have taken it herself, of course, technically, but the odds are she didn't. My guy thinks somebody was with her and got it into her drink. Then when she was woozy, popped her full of amytriptilene. She would have been feeling funny anyway, dizzy and/or sick. Maybe he told her it was aspirin. They're tiny pills, and it looks like he gave her a lot of them. So the roofie"—the street name for Rohypnol—"kept her from waking up as she went into tachycardia from the amytriptilene. And after she was out, somebody tried to throw off the investigation—at least for a while—by trying to force some codeine down her throat as well."

  "That's a bizarre way to kill someone," Gina said.

  Wes shrugged. "Maybe sometimes you've just gotta take what's available."

  "No," Stuart said. "Kym used to take amytriptilene. It was one of the first things we tried, but her current doc put her on lithium and it seems to work better. At least when she takes it the way she's supposed to."

  Gina's fatigue was forgotten. She was still running on the adrenaline rush she'd picked up in Farrell's office. Kelley Rusnak's probable murder eliminated the last shred of doubt. Stuart hadn't killed Caryn. Two women working on the same project for the same company had now been killed within three weeks of each other, and the idea that these murders were unrelated was too much for Gina to swallow.

  And not only were they related, in all probability they were committed by the same person. The Dryden Socket had now become the center of Gina's case, and ironically enough, it was still no formal part of it; there was no evidence about it, no testimony related to it. She doubted if Gerry Abrams had ever heard of it.

  But what it meant for Stuart, of course, was that he was innocent. Gina thought she might even get Wyatt Hunt to persuade Juhle to give the matter some of his attention. But that would be for later, if at all.

  Now it was seven thirty and Gina had still not gone home, but rather had cabbed directly from her office down to the Hall of Justice again. She and Stuart were in the semicircular main Attorney Visiting Room at the jail—the glass block, the long table, the two chairs. Stuart had sustained several bruises on his arms and a couple more on his head, along with the one gash at his hairline that had bled so prolifically, but all he had to show for it was a two-inch-square bandage on his forehead. "So why do you want to know about Kymberly and amytriptilene?" he asked her.

  Gina considered her response, then decided she had to give it to him straight. "Because Kelley Rusnak died of an overdose of amytriptilene."

  A confused frown passed over Stuart’s face. "I don't see the connection. What could Kelley's suicide have to do with Kymberly?"

  "I'm getting ahead of myself," Gina said. "As it turns out, Kelley wasn't a suicide after all." Carefully leaving nothing out, she filled him in on Farrell's information. "Anyway," she concluded, "amytriptilene is a link. I wanted to see where it might connect."

  "You're not saying you think that Kymberly could have had a part in any of this?"

  Gina looked hard at his face, tortured now by this possibility. "I talked to her before the afternoon session today, Stuart," she said gently. "I asked her what she'd been calling Caryn about on that last weekend. She told me she asked her for money, and that Caryn turned her down. You realize that if you're in jail and Caryn's dead, she's going to have nearly unimpeded access to all of your money."

  "You can't believe any of this."

  "What I'm wondering, Stuart, is why you can't. Once Caryn was out of the way, who was the only person standing in the way of the Dryden Socket coming out on schedule? Kelley Rusnak. When Kymberly visited you here in jail, did you mention your visit down to Kelley? Did you tell her what you'd talked about?"

  "I told a lot of people. Everybody who came by. I wanted it clear. Kelley and Furth were proof I wasn't running and hiding from Juhle." He ran a hand down the side of his face. "She could never have killed her mother. And she didn't have any amytriptilene anyway."

  Keeping her calm, Gina asked, "Were her expired prescriptions refillable?"

  Suddenly slamming his hand flat on the table. "No! Goddammit! No!" Out of his chair now, he grabbed the back of it and Gina thought for a moment he was going to throw it in his fury, but he got himself back under control enough to look her in the eye and say, "We're not going there, you hear me. We're not doing this."

  Abruptly, he turned from her and walked as far away as he could get. In the far corner, he stood with palms pressed against the glass block, his head down. After a long minute, Gina got up and walked over behind him. She touched his shoulder, her palm flat against his back. She felt his shoulders heave once, then again. Then they gave way altogether in a series of smaller, silent quakes. In the presence of such abject and obvious pain, memories of her own agonies over David Freeman—when her resolve and her spirit just broke—came swelling up over her, making her head swim, tightening her throat.

  She didn't trust herself to move. "All right, Stuart," she whispered. "All right."

  Since she was never going to get anything like a night's sleep in her life again anyway, when Wyatt called her at home at ten thirty, she told him he could stop by and talk to her in person on his way back to his place. When she opened the door, he grinned wearily and said, "We've got to stop meeting like this."

  But that was as light as it got before it got heavy again. Before he'd even gotten a chance to report on Bob McAfee, she told him about Kelley Rusnak and her fears about Kymberly. "At least now we know why she's laying so low. Why she didn't want to come to the courtroom. I need you to find her, Wyatt. I need to find out where she was and what she was doing last Friday. Drop everything else. I've got her cell number. If she picks up even for a few minutes, Juhle can somehow get at least her approximate location."

  "Maybe Juhle can, Gina, but I'm not sure I can get him to do that for us."

  "Could you call in a favor?"

  "From Devin? After what you did to him on the stand today? Probably not."

  "Well, I need to find her. Maybe if you tell Devin about Kelley being murdered?"

  Hunt shook his head. "Not in his jurisdiction. He's not interested."

  "He's got to be. Kelley's got to be part of Caryn. He has to see that. It's still his case. Here's his chance—if he solves the mystery, he can still be a hero. If it turns out it doesn't make any difference, he's still the dedicated cop who spares no effort in the pursuit of the truth."

  Clearly, from Hunt's expression, he thought it was an extreme long shot, but he finally shrugged. "What the hell. Can't hurt to ask. You mind if we sit down?"

  Gina, who'd been on a tear of intensity for longer
than she could remember, felt the tension in her break. "Sure, I'm sorry. I'm a little wound up. You feel like a drink or a beer or something?"

  "Why? Do I look like one?" He waved it off. "No, I'm good," he said. "But with all this talk about Kelley and Kymberly and how everything's all got to be related, I hope you haven't given up completely on the good Doctor McAfee."

  Gina rolled her eyes. "Don't even tell me. Why?"

  "Because it appears that he forgot to mention taking his car out of his garage sometime around ten or so the night Caryn got killed."

  "You're kidding me."

  Hunt held up three fingers. "Scout's honor."

  "Somebody specifically remembered that? Three weeks ago? How'd that happen?"

  "Young love to the rescue once again." He had his little pocket notepad out and was flipping the pages. "Here you go," he said. "Lloyd Phipps and Abby Loran, number 17-B, same building as McAfee. In fact, Lloyd knows him enough to borrow stuff. The ID is rock solid."

  "Okay, what about them?"

  "Abby moved in with Lloyd that night, so they remember the date. They're still doing weekaversaries. It's kind of cute. Anyway, there they are, down in the garage, moving up the last carload of her stuff, and McAfee comes out, says he's having trouble sleeping, he's going down to buy some Ovaltine . . ."

  "You're making this up." "I'm not. It's what happened." "Did they see him come back?"

  No.

  "No, of course not." She closed her eyes and let out a sigh. "So I'm going to have to subpoena them. And McAfee, too."

  "Shouldn't be a big problem," Hunt said. "I've got their addresses at work. I told them it might be happening. Didn't bother either of them. Of course, I could have told them I was the grim reaper and it wouldn't have bothered them much either. Long as they could go together."

  "Young love," Gina said wistfully.

  "You really can't knock it," Hunt replied. "It's a beautiful thing."

  34